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| MORTALITY |
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Mortality: Negotiations Towards Death
"Imagination is at bottom the relationship with death. The image is death. A proposition that one may define or make indefinite thus: the image is a death or (the) death is an image."- Jacques Derrida
"The function of desire must remain in a fundamental relation with death."- Jacques Lacan
"They do not think of death, having no other relation but with death."- Maurice Blanchot
"Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species."- Friedrich Nietzsche
"The mortals are the human beings. They are called mortals because they can die. To die means to be capable of death as death. Only man dies, and indeed continually, as long as he remains on earth, under the sky, before the divinities."- Martin Heidegger
"In the halo of death, and there alone, the self founds its empire; there the purity of a hopeless requirement comes to light; there the hope of the self-that-dies is realized (vertiginous hope, burning with fever, where the limit of dream is pushed back)."- Georges Bataille
"Immortal mortals, mortal immortals, one living the others' death and dying the others' life."- Heraclitus
"To die: as if we only died in the infinitive. To die: the reflection in the mirror perhaps, the mirroring of an absence of figure, less the image of someone or something that was not there than an effect of invisibility, touching on nothing profound and only too superficial to let itself be grasped or even recognized. As if the invisible distributed itself in filigree, without the distribution of points of visibility being there for anything, thus not in the intimacy of the design, but too much on the outside, in an exteriority of being which being bears no marks."- Maurice Blanchot
"The anguish-inspiring character of death signifies the need which man has for anguish. Without this need, death would seem easy to him. Man, dying poorly, distances himself from nature, engenders an illusory, human world fashioned for art: we live in the tragic world, in the false atmosphere of which 'tragedy' is the completed form. Nothing is tragic for the animal, which doesn't fall into the trap of the self."- Georges Bataille
"Death eats up all things, both the young lamb and old sheep; and I have heard our parson say, death values a prince no more than a clown; all's fish that comes to his net; he throws at all, and sweeps stakes; he's no mower that takes a nap at noon-day, but drives on, fair weather or foul, and cuts down the green grass as well as the ripe corn: he's neither squeamish nor queesy-stomach'd, for he swallows without chewing, and crams down all things into his ungracious maw; and tho' you can see no belly he has, he has a confounded dropsy, and thirsts after men's lives, which he guggles down like mother's milk."- Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
"I can bear the weight of the future only on one condition: that others, always others, live in it- and that death washes us, then washes these others without end."- Georges Bataille
"He had decided to live for ever or die in the attempt."- Joseph Heller, Catch-22
"Since the death instinct exists in the heart of everything that lives, since we suffer from trying to repress it, since everything that lives longs for rest, let us unfasten the ties that bind us to life, let us cultivate our death wish, let us develop it, water it like a plant, let it grow unhindered. Suffering and fear are born from the repression of the death wish."- Eugène Ionesco
"Between my head and my hand, there is always the face of death."- Francis Picabia
"life is a costume grafted to a dead tree
that will awaken after death
among the dead"- Antonin Artaud
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